About 7 years ago, I was completely filled with corporate disgust at the way people were managed; including myself. Turns out I was never supposed to be an employee….who knew? But the truth is, entrepreneurs do things differently, so when I decided to start a company I believed that there simply had to be a better way.
I set about trying to come up with a name for this new enterprise of mine, and as anyone out there who has started a business knows, picking a name is a real challenge. Unless you have that lightning bolt hit you during a 2:00 a.m. moment, you struggle to find those two words or phrases that sum up who you are, that also describe what you do. I chose hr-haven – figured it meant that this was where you would go when you needed help with your humans – a safe place for entrepreneurs to come for help when they didn’t have anywhere else to turn.
I was totally wrong and I’m not afraid to admit it.
Turns out that HR isn’t what we do at all – I mean, we do some of the stuffy, corporate human resources crap that HR folks do – after all, we want to keep our clients out of jail. But, HR is really dead – if you’re in HR and you’re dishing out rules and regulations but not building anything then you simply aren’t contributing. What entrepreneur would willingly introduce that into their businesses? What we do is so much more.
It ranges from helping clients personally with leadership and business skills, talking them off the ledge as needed (sometimes daily), to organizing their companies, making sure that they are efficient and able to scale, and figuring out “who” their organizations are to help them find the right voice so that we can recruit the right employee believers in the first place. Then we support the culture created, creating custom programs for each of them that resonate with their culture and internal brand. No cookie cutter here, and definitely not your parents “personnel department.” Probably more important than anything, we’re usually the chief cheerleaders and supporters of our entrepreneur clients themselves because it’s lonely at the top and you need a confidant or consiglieri (as we’ve been referred to a number of times) to get you over the down times in business, because not every day is as cool and exciting as you’d think, now is it friends? Think about it, business is all about the people, people – and that includes you.
The funny thing is, in naming the company back in 2009 I thought we’d conjure up the right frame of mind for the audience we wanted to cater to. When we called together a few clients last year, they said that HR was the antithesis of what they needed. In fact, the mere mention of HR, especially in our name, initially caused them to hesitate in calling us. They didn’t need HR, they needed help with their people. They weren’t corporate, they were entrepreneurs. They didn’t want “corporate” invading their workplaces. They wanted to be agile, culturally healthy companies, not hall-monitoring HR trolls with red tape as far as the eye could see. And their opinion was that HR was dead too. So it started, the hunt for a new name that really reflected the personality and culture of OUR company.
Enter DMH – that cool Ad Agency down in the Crossroads who we’ve had the privilege of serving as clients since almost the beginning of our business. We’ve kind of grown up together, which means they already had a solid understanding of what we do for our client since they have seen it first hand over the years – and they aced it.
I’m ecstatic to rebrand – for the first time since being in business I finally feel that our company name is not only reflective of what we do, but fits our business personality better than anything I could have come up with, regardless of whether it was back in the start-up days or now. People People, think about it. It’s all we’ve done, and all we’ve ever wanted to do. Check out DMH’s good work on our new website at www.peoplepeopleus.com. If you’re one of those people that needs help with people that isn’t just stifling HR, then maybe you should call one of our people?